Kickstarter

The StingRay is yet another wireless sensor board. Very similar to all the other ones around, but packs in pressure, temperature, heart rate, blood oxygen, and IMU sensors as well as bluetooth, Cortex M4F MCU and LiPo charger.

They claim a 50Hz sample rate, which isn’t incredibly fast, but usable in 99% of applications.

This one is odd in that you don’t actually get the product when the campaign finishes. All you get is the chance to purchase it at a reduced price. Hmmm.

UPDATE: This is one Kickstarter campaign creator to avoid. He has a string of 3 campaigns with failed delivery. You have been warned!

The DacBerry One is interesting for me as I am working on a project that begs the question “Does a PWM controlled LED emit ultrasonic frequencies that a mouse can hear?”… OK, long story…

Anyway, it’s a high quality DAC that fits on to a Raspberry Pi and is capable sampling up to 384kHz at 32 bit resolution. It uses the Wolfson WM8804 chipset which has been in other Pi products before, but this one provides coax in and out or BNC stereo out, headphone jack and TOSLINK out.

The VGAduino 2 is an upgrade on the previous Kickstarter and gives you VGA output for an Arduino.

This one now handles up to 400×300 resolution at 60Hz and 256 colours per pixel. It uses the LPC1756 ARM chip and Xilinx XC95144 CPLD for handling all the sync grunt work. Communication is via standard UART so you could really use it on anything.

For a bit of bedtime reading you could always pick up “Deep Learning fo Computer Vision” written by Adrian Rosebrock. You might know him. He’s been a round a bit having written a previous book on “Practical Python and OpenCV” and is really a guru on machine vision.

If you’re in to marine robotics, then the T200 thruster might interest you. It’s an upgrade on their previous Kickstarter with double the forward and reverse thrust, but also double the power requirements. This one requiring between 6 to 20 volts with a max current of 25A.

The DIY mini Lego drone seems to have taken off. It looks good, but no indication of what or how you program it. Or in fact what it actually contains. I’m assuming it’s the same kit as the one on their website, but at a cheaper price.

This isn’t really a Maker product, but I’ve included it in the list because of the hacking potential. The Moodo gives you the ability to generate smells on demand. So far they have only a small range of smell cartridges that you can use, but it’ll only be a matter of time before some hacks it to produce more interesting smells.

Others

If you’re in to robotics, then there’s a new Intel Joule compute module for the AeroCore 2 family. Contains an ARM Cortex M4, running NuttX RTOS, header for Intel Joule, 9DOF IMU, 40 pin GPIO on top of the usual I2C, SPI, ADC and 8 PWM outputs and also optional GPS, and LTE modem.

Remember the Pine64 reviews I did? Seems I’ve been accused by more than one person of single-handedly contributing to the demise of that board with my realistic reviews.

Anyway, things seem to be moving on in the Pine64 camp and apart from that small hiccup last year they now have a product called the SoPine, which aims to take on the Pi compute module. Contains the usual 64bit quad core ARM MCU, 2G DDR3 RAM, SD slot, and 128M SPI flash all in a small SODIMM form factor.

They also have the SoPine baseboard, which contains various ports that they don’t mention. I’m assuming it’s the same as the original Pine64.

It’s probably about time I revisit this board.

Tindie

Last week I seemed to have missed out the whole Tindie section. Sorry about that everyone.

The Espruino Puck is a basically an expensive switch… Well… it is a switch and it is expensive, but it also contains an nRF52832 based SoC, NFC, capacitive touch, magnetometer, IR transmitter, thermometer, light and battery sensors.

You can program it using Javascript and get it to do a bucket load of things.

AdaFruit currently have a page but no stock, so just get it from Tindie!

RoboPi is a kit that allows you to offload a lot of the real time control to a sub-processor which is the Parallax Propeller. This is an 8 core RISC processor designed specifically for real time applications.

It contains onboard voltage regulators, ADCs, and expansion headers for Mikronauts. It’s compatible with almost every SBC out there.

If you’re in to wireless communications and I mean really in to it, then the bladeRF at SparkFun will seem a reasonable price. Yes, it’s expensive, but it transceive any protocol from 300MHz to 3.8GHz.

You can get it to speak RF, GPS, bluetooth, WiFi, LTE, GSM, ATSC… anything. Pretty good package at that price.

This first Weeky Roundup of the year and we're already seeing lots of new goodies from SBCs, to WiFi modules, but really a tonne of new SBCs. Continue reading Weekly Roundup #62: New Maker Products // News→

This week's Weekly Roundup, which hasn't really been weekly for the past month, we're seeing a fair amount of retro kit, FPGAs and SBCs. Basically a whole lot of stuff that is really cool that you didn't know you needed. Continue reading Weekly Roundup #61: New Maker Products // News→

This week's Weekly Roundup is actually a little short, but we have FPGAs, SBCs and other cool things I've found in my travels on the interwebs. Continue reading Weekly Roundup #60: New Maker Products // News→

An SBC that's not really an SBC. Based on the NationalChip GX6605S, it runs a tiny Linux with a very small component count, but is it too cool to be usable? Continue reading The C-Sky SBC: Pi in the Sky? // Review→

In this review I take a look at one of the newer members of the Khadas family; The Khadas Edge and Khadas Captain. This board has some pretty interesting power management but, unfortunately, I saw the return of the magic smoke genie. Continue reading The Khadas Edge: A new captain

The LattePanda Alpha SBC is a bit of a beast not only in horse power, but in price. In this video I look at benchmarks on Windows, Linux and OSX and give my perspective on why LattePanda made a big mistake. Continue reading LattePanda Alpha: The big mistake? // Review→

This quick project shows you how to build an MQTT controlled RGB LED matrix panel in under 30 minutes, but I reckon it should take you a lot less. Continue reading Build an MQTT based RGB LED panel! // Project→

Do you want to be able to send an SMS over 20kms without using a mobile phone network? Here's one small project you can knock up in less than a day allowing you to send an SMS over LoRa. Continue reading SMS over LoRa: Long distance SMS without 4G //

If you're a fan of GoLang then your options are limited in the embedded world. So, here's a couple of options for you with a working bare metal example for an STM32 MCU written entirely in Go. Continue reading Running GoLang on an STM32 MCU. A quick tutorial.→

This is the second part of my video on building a simple PCB using EasyEDA. This time we'll be taking a look at how to use a solder stencil, placing SMD components, soldering using kitchen equipment and how to fix up your mistakes. Continue reading Make a PCB from scratch

A follow-up to my video tutorial: "Program an Atmel SAM without an IDE". I've created a Docker container on GitHub with a complete ASF build chain. Ready to go. Go for it! Continue reading Atmel Software Framework and build chain in a Docker container→

A bit of a different mailbag this week. Containing a lot of bits and pieces for upcoming projects and other odds and ends. Continue reading MickMake Mail #30: Gakken, JLCPCB, wicking and skulls // News→